September 2008

Volume 95, No. 2

Articles

Exploiting the North-South Differential: Corporate Power, Southern Politics, and the Decline of Organized Labor after World War II

Courtesy Greenville Area Chamber of Commerce, Greenville, Miss.

The defense of states’ rights by white southerners in the post—World War II era has long been understood as a strategy to prevent federal interference with racial segregation. By tracing the relocation of the Alexander Smith Carpet Company from Yonkers, New York, to Greenville, Mississippi, in the early 1950s, Tami J. Friedman shows that upholding states’ rights had economic as well as racial connotations. The argument for states’ rights appealed to northern businessmen seeking favorable investment climates as well as to southern boosters who hoped industrialization would help preserve their region’s racial and political status quo. This essay explores how a shared commitment to capital migration united northern and southern leaders across regional boundaries, increasing the vulnerability of workers and communities to corporate power on both sides of the North-South divide. (pp. 323–48) Read online >

The Religious Encounters of Alfred C. Kinsey

Following the publication of Alfred C. Kinsey’s two most famous works—Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953)— his critics branded him as a foe of traditional religion and an enemy of American Christian values. Kinsey’s disdain for what he saw as outdated religious moralizing about issues such as premarital and homosexual sex is apparent. But, R. Marie Griffith shows, he had ties to important liberal Protestant leaders. By exploring Kinsey’s correspondence with members of the clergy and tracing the work on sexual issues that many of those religious leaders pursued after his death, Griffith analyzes Kinsey’s impact on religious ideas about sex in both liberal and conservative religious circles. Seeing Kinsey’s influence on religious liberals helps us rethink the complicated relationship between religion and sexuality, and the so-called culture wars, in recent U.S. history. (pp. 349–77) Read online >

The Senses in American History: A Round Table

What does increasing interest in the multidisciplinary study of the senses have to offer historians? This Journal of American History round table, guest edited by Mark M. Smith, offers essays by Smith, Gerard J. Fitzgerald and Gabriella M. Petrick, Connie Y. Chiang, Richard Cullen Rath, James W. Cook, and David Howes that acquaint readers with the historiography of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound. The essays offer case studies suggestive of how historians might attend to the senses in their own work.

Still Coming to “Our” Senses: An Introduction

Getting in Touch with Slavery and Freedom

Mark M. Smith challenges the argument that tactility—literal and metaphorical reliance on the sense of touch to explain experience—is a preeminently premodern form of knowledge. In Enlightenment America, he suggests, defining social issues were processed, not just visually, but in a multisensory fashion. He points specifically to the importance of tacility in elaborating eighteenth- and nineteenth-century meanings of slavery, capitalism, humanitarianism, and freedom. Adam Smith’s seen hand held a powerful tactile, or haptic, quality for antebellum Americans, one that helped inform sectional identity. There was more to modernity than meets the eye; skin—how it was felt as well as seen—was critical to elaborations of self and other, slave and free, black and white, northerner and southerner. (pp. 381–91) Read online >

In Good Taste: Rethinking American History with Our Palates

The sense of taste is often overlooked in the study of history, but Gerard J. Fitzgerald and Gabriella M. Petrick show how “tasting” history can recast our understanding of American industrialization. Focusing on two of the new mass-produced, nationally distributed foods made available in the wake of industrialization, this article examines how iceberg lettuce came to define salad in the United States and how teenagers’ demand for sweets dramatically increased soda consumption after World War II. In both instances, the foods Americans consumed changed radically, as did the perceptions of their palatability. By simultaneously examining the biological and cultural aspects of taste, we learn that what Americans ate, as much as who Americans were, shaped what tasted “good.” (pp. 392–404) Read online >

The Nose Knows: The Sense of Smell in American History

Courtesy Monterey Public Library, California History Room Archives.

Americans have long lived in an odorous world, but few historians have examined how the sense of smell shaped the past. Connie Y. Chiang explores the significance of smell, arguing that an olfactory approach to studying the past provides a powerful tool for understanding American history. Using Monterey, California, in the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century, as a case study, Chiang shows that Americans obtained knowledge about their social and physical surroundings through their noses. Because of the intrinsic subjectivity of smell, contending groups could interpret odors to suit their changing values and agendas and construct smells in ways that might enable them to wield power over people and places. A smell-centered analysis provides insight into the inextricable links between social and environmental changes across the American landscape. (pp. 405–417) Read online >

Hearing American History

Richard Cullen Rath’s essay encourages historians to consider the senses, in particular hearing, as being historically situated rather than functioning in a state of nature and to broaden their notion of what Americans heard beyond music and speech to include the full spectrum of hearing at particular times and places. A spate of recent books and articles have done just that, and the one thing they all share is the power to open the ears of historians to the importance of hearing and sound in the construction of modernity. Innovations in media, their work suggests, have often had unforeseen consequences that have both reflected and constituted changes in the ways modern people hear. (pp. 417–31) Read online >

Seeing the Visual in U.S. History

For many years historians tended to conceptualize visual sources one-dimensionally, as the stuff of “illustrations.” Recently, this reflex has given way to innovative studies of seeing itself, defined by scholars as a sensory activity and a culturally mediated form of perception; a spectrum of representations and a mix of observational techniques; unconscious apprehension and structured spectatorship. James W. Cook explores these heterogeneous dimensions of visual experience and demonstrates their importance for core issues in U.S. historiography: from the rise of consumerism to political struggles around minority self-representation. His essay concludes by pondering vision’s increasingly contested preeminence among the five senses—a position, Cook argues, that cannot simply be undone by revisionist scholarship. (pp. 432–41) Read online >

Can These Dry Bones Live? An Anthropological Approach to the History of the Senses

An intense new interest in the cultural life of the senses is sweeping the human sciences. In his essay, David Howes sets the stage for a mutually enriching dialogue between the disciplines of history and anthropology on how to chart the varieties of sensory experiences across cultures and in different historical periods. Analyzing the sensory values espoused by a society is vital to understanding how its members conceive of and interact with each other and the surrounding world. Howes suggests methodological strategies in a bid to disclose how contemporary historians can recover the sense(s) of the past. (pp. 442–51) Read online >

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